Challenges Brought About by Climate Change and Global Warming

Research Discursive Approach
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Research Discursive Approach
Climate change and global warming have emerged as the two most threatening human, animal, and plant life processes. This affects both the marine life and life on the land. Climate change, which is the alterations in climatic patterns of various regions around the world, has led to increased levels carbon dioxide gas, which is primarily generated from fossil fuels (Brooks, Oxley, Vedlitz, Zahran, & Lindsey, 2014). These global changes have had a significant impact on earth life, affecting both marine and terrestrial life. Among the effects of these global changes on people and the environment on earth, including changes in sea levels due to melting ice sheets, increased global warming, extreme drought conditions, and decline in crop productivity, changing ecosystems, and the acidification of water bodies (Meyer, 2012). These severe consequences of climatic change pose a significant threat to the lives of humans and other organisms on earth. While climate change is caused by natural causes such as volcanic eruptions, shifts in ocean currents, solar variation, and orbital changes of the earth, it is often exacerbated by human actions such as deforestation, burning fossil fuels, industrial processes, poor agricultural practices, and coal mining.
Climate change has resulted in some devastating consequences within the past half a century. Global temperatures have increased at an unprecedented rate within that time resulting in a series of life-threatening weather events such as droughts, heatwaves, floods, and other natural disasters that have become more frequent and more severe (Mckinney et al., 2015). These changes in climatic patterns have affected not only the developing countries but also the developed nations such as the US. For instance, in 2019, Australian Bush fires ravaged more than 12 million acres of land in a period spanning more than three months. The fires affected the habitats of millions of species, causing some of them to be endangered. There is a direct link between the vast forest fires and global warming, and climate change. Similar fires were also witnessed in the US in 2017 when Los Angeles had one of the largest fires in its history while Texas and Florida experienced major destructions from Hurricane Harvey and Irma, respectively (Borenstein, 2020). While many people around the world have come to accept the environmental impact of climate change, many of them are yet to grasp the expected effects of these climatic changes.
The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) developed the logic behind climate change by demonstrating how different elements work together to exacerbate climate change (Meyer, 2012). This logic helped develop the catastrophic manmade global warming theory. According to this theory, carbon dioxide gas contributes to global warming through the greenhouse effect. The process is then intensified by a series of processes that increase the global temperatures even further (Meyer, 2012). Consequently, the increased global temperatures result in various undesirable co...